Carolina QuotesA university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. The library is the university.
Shelby Foote Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Shelby Foote quoted in: North Carolina Libraries, Vol. 51-54 (1993), p. 162
- year
- 1993
- locator
- p. 162
Cite this record
“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a …” Shelby Foote. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-7408E2BAF5. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/7408e2baf5
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Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.
As a protest against the election of Abraham Lincoln, who had received not a single southern electoral vote, secession was a fact—to be reinforced, if necessary, by the sword. The senator from Mississippi [Jefferson Davis] rose. It was high noon. ...He was going home. ...By nature he was a moderate, with a deep devotion to the Union. ...he reserved secession as a last resort.
The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.